JK Rowling on the Oprah Winfrey Show in Edinburgh, ABC: US tv review

Oprah’s interview of the first self-made billionaire author in Edinburgh’s
Balmoral Hotel revealed an unpretentious superstar who credits her success
to “hitting rock bottom”.

JK Rowling appears on OprahPhoto: INF

By Rachel Ray, in Washington

12:30PM BST 04 Oct 2010

Both JK Rowling and Oprah are winding down in a way. “We have a lot in common” Oprah observed to her sister billionaire in a tea-serviced suite at the elegant Balmoral Hotel. Next month, the first of two movies based on the Deathly Hallows, the final installment of the Harry Potter series, will open while Oprah’s eponymous show is in its final season.

Oprah accurately promoted Rowling’s appearance as “one of my most fascinating interviews” although she twice injected her friend, the late Michael Jackson, into the discussion. Once was to compare the Harry Potter phenomenon to the success of Jackson’s album Thriller and another time was to ask Rowling about Jackson’s request to turn the Harry Potter books into a musical. An emphatic “NO” was Rowling’s reaction to the idea when proposed by the troubled King of Pop.

Despite such strange sidetracking, the interview captivated because of the down-to-earth Rowling’s forthrightness in describing the turbulent life of a woman who’s longed to be a writer since age five. That she persevered with her idea about a boy wizard---despite the rejection of twelve publishers who repeatedly denigrated the story’s commercial appeal---can be attributed, in her view, to a tenuous, depressed existence in which she had nothing to lose.

Fleeing to Portugal when she was 25, right after her beloved mother’s death, Rowling soon moved back to Scotland with her daughter after the breakup of a bad one-year marriage. With no means of support she “walked straight into poverty and depression”. As Rowling put it, “I was as poor as you can get without being homeless.”

On a train from Manchester to London, her mind was flooded with ideas about a boy wizard who attends a school where professors teach magic. For the next 17 years she would work on the seven books of the Harry Potter series.

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Rowling believes that “failure is so important and not spoken about enough”. She said that failure is essential to life unless you are a person who is so cautious that you might not have lived at all. Failure to Rowling is the catalyst for taking risks and she noted that “hitting rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life”.

Rowling expressed concern that people are becoming afraid to use their imaginations and stated that she had no agenda in her books to promote any religion or set of beliefs. Telling Oprah that she believes in God, Rowling said that if readers find Christianity in her books, it comes from her experiences being brought up in the Christian tradition and as for witchcraft, it’s a belief system that’s been passed down through history. It’s “nonsensical” to think that witchcraft shouldn’t be written about, she said. The only magic Rowling believes in is the “magic” of personal power that all people possess to solve their own problems.

Stressing that the Harry Potter books are about the triumph of love over fear and death, she noted that they would not have been written without her mother’s own death as the impetus. She acknowledged that she was currently estranged from her father stating only, “I have my reasons”. The “billionaire mom”, as Oprah referred to her, now lives in Edinburgh with her second husband, a doctor, and their three children.

Rowling said that she cried uncontrollably when she finished writing The Deathly Hallows which brought an end to the Harry Potter hero’s journey but that the “characters are still all in my head” and “I could easily write an eighth or ninth” book.

Against a personal background of loss and failure, Rowling observed that there was always one bright spot, "The one thing in my life---I could tell a story. You’ve got to believe, haven’t you?”